We are all aware of the numerous Good Food Guides available, but we
don’t often consider the other side of the coin as it were. However there is a
publication dedicated to Good Loos, whose employees and volunteers inspect and
grade loos all over the country on our behalf, and award stars to those members
of staff and facilities who perform well.

As well as the usual consideration of cleanliness and hygiene,
conveniences have to ‘tick the right boxes’ to gain an award. It is only the
last decade that we have seen an increased awareness of the need for disabled
facilities, and for babychanging, to the point where they are now accepted as
normal features. Other types of needs are catered for, the latest box on the
test sheet being for a colostomy shelf, which may well be a standard feature in
another ten years.

There are different categories, such as motorway loos, those in
attractions open to the public, local authority, hotels to name but a few, and
many attendants take a fierce pride in the services available, with scented
soaps and handcreams becoming increasingly common, along with carpeted floors,
curtains and flower arrangements. The awards are eagerly sought after.

The words ‘toilet’ and ‘lavatory’ have connotations of class, which
have varied over the centuries. Lavatory comes from the latin lavare – to wash,
while toilet came with the upstart Norman invaders. Loo seems to be the
acceptable word of our time. It is apparently derived from the middles ages
when people living in cities threw the contents of their chamber pots out of
the window each morning, shouting ‘gardez l’eau’ to warn unwary passers by. It
is said that this habit gave rise to the convention whereby a gentleman walked
on the outside, thus protecting a lady from a deluge overhead or splashing my
modern vehicles.

The accepted wisdom is that the modern water closet was invented by Mr
Thomas Crapper. As usual this is wrong. Although he did hold nine patents
relating to plumbing he merely improved on something already invented. Water
closet systems have been around in some form or other for thousands of years,
alongside the simpler type of earth closet used more widely in less
sophisticated societies. Waste management has always been easier in rural
areas, often simply a question of digging a hole and gradually filling it with
earth. Seats were considered a refinement, often two or three holes of
different sizes cut out of a plank over a pit.

Even a cursory glance at history throws up some fascinating facts. In
Skara Brae in the north of Scotland, Neolithic stone houses have been excavated
which have what is quite literally a smallest room built on the side over
running water, with a drainage system. Mediaeval castles had a cupboard
arrangement for the lord and his family, consisting of a small room with a
wooden seat which jutted out over the walls and which emptied straight into the
moat. Later manor houses had the same sort of arrangement whereby the houses
were jetted, that is where each storey jutted out over the one below. These
emptied straight into the midden, the contents of which were then spread over
the fields as fertiliser, a practice which continues in China even today.

Henry VIII was known to complain of the fact that he was never alone
for a moment – no, not even there, unless he were just using the jordan, or
pisspot as it was also known. There was a ‘groom of the stool’ appointed, whose
job was to wipe the royal backside. Oddly enough, this position was sought
after, because its intimacy with the kingmeant that information could be acquired for which other people were
willing to pay .It was as long ago as 1596 that Sir Thomas Harrington invented
a water flushing loo for Elizabeth 1st, his godmother. It was not
widely adopted because of a general lack of running water, and like many an
inventor before or since he was told that the idea would never catch on!

It is to those energetic and inventive Victorians that we owe the
sewage management systems we have today. Places like London became increasingly
smelly and obnoxious, with streets full of sewage draining eventually into the
Thames and causing frequent epidemics of cholera. The miasma became so bad that
at one time Parliament was unable to continue sitting, and the river itself was
dying. In 1848 therefore, the first Public Health Act was passed, banning
people from polluting the Thames, which was after all a major source of
drinking water for the city, and underground sewage systems were first built.

In 1885 Mr Twyford invented the first one piece toilet, and Alexander
Cummings then invented the S bend still in use today, with a water seal to
prevent odours from the sewers escaping back up. The very first flushing closet
on the continent was built at Ehrenburg Castle in Coburg, installed specially
for the visit of Queen Victoria in 1860, and no one else was allowed to use it.
It is widely believed that lack of proper sanitation was partly responsible for
the death of Prince Albert, for some of the closets at Windsor Castle emptied
straight onto the roofnear the family’s
living quarters. It was in that same year that the very first public
conveniences were exhibited at the Crystal Palace, with white coated attendants
who charged members of the public the vast sum of one penny to use them,
thereby giving rise to the euphemism ‘spend a penny’. At that time Britain led
the world in terms of waste management, though the USA soon began to catch up.

Obviously these improved sanitary measures were not introduced
uniformly throughout society. Thunderboxes as they were called, were still used
in living memory, especially in rural areas, and indeed still are in remote
locations. Night carts would call to empty the cess pits of those who could
afford it, otherwise in rural gardens the privy would be dug in a different location
every few months. It was in the crowded towns where of necessity bigger strides
were made in coping with the problems of sanitation. Once a regular water
supply and sewage pipes were installed, houses were built with a loo in the
back garden, often attached to the house, and then – what a luxury – moved
indoors.

When we are growing up, the familiar ways seem to be the only right
and natural ways of doing things. It is always a slight culture shock to find
that other people have different customs. Even today we consider that some
continental countries lag behind us in this respect, even as we lag behind the
USA. When going to Spain in the fifties, before private en suites were even
thought of, one was advised that even in the larger hotels the best time for
using the facilities was early morning as later in the day the systems were
unable to cope. The resulting queues can be imagined. It was also a shock to go
on a day trip to France in the early sixties, at a time when most people did
not ‘go abroad’, for a gentleman to realise when in full flow that an elderly
woman was standing next to him holding out a towel.

Public facilities such as ours are few and far betweenon some parts of the continent. On enquiring
at the information kiosk one is told that the custom is to use those in cafés
and restaurants. These vary widely. Some have systems which are unable to cope
with paper, which has to be left in a box; some have unisex toilets, and many
have what is known as the Japanese toilet. This consists of a hole in the
ground with footholds, over which one squats, sometimes facing the wall,
sometimes facing away – all very confusing. To our sensibilities this seems
rather revolting, but those used to this type find the idea of sitting on a
seat which someone else’s posterior has just vacated to be equally distasteful.
It has been reported that the authorities are having to install Japanese
toilets in some refugee camps because the inmates were leaving muddy footprints
on the seats.

The growth of the tourism industry has meant that many places abroad
have upgraded their facilities. In this country it is becoming rare to have
accommodation which does not offer en suites, but once they were the
prerogative of the rich and privileged. Our motorway service stations, once
known for the generally disgusting state of their loos, have improved out of
all recognition. It is an interesting fact that women were originally accepted
into the police force, early in the 20th century because in those
conventional days a ladies’ loo was the one place into which policemen did not
have access, so ‘lady policemen’ were appointed to check out anything
suspicious. Nowadays it is quite common to find male janitors cleaning the
area, though most will put up a warning notice.

Public facilities have improved tremendously over the last few years,
but we still have some way to go before we can match the best that the USA has
to offer. Americans vociferously demand the highest standards, and get them.
Some of the rest rooms in places like Las Vegas are like palaces, with deep
pile carpets, lace curtains, lounges with sofas, tissue seat covers, fresh
pedestal flower arrangements and furnishings which cost as much as whole
streets of houses would over here.

Over the years other inventions have included portable loos for
caravans and boats, cruise ships where the whole system works on a vacuum
siphoning principle, magic beams where the user just passes a hand over to
flush – a bit disconcerting if one fidgets and the loo flushes while in use –
seats which revolve under a disinfectant spray, and the modern superloos which
disinfect everything in sight. In contrast with the fact that many parts of the
world still use the hole in the ground system, in our country, where once an
indoor loo was considered a luxury, it is becoming quite usual to find homes
being built with three or more loos. What would our ancestors make of it all?
And where do we go from here?